Endorheic
A young geologist publishes the official account of an unprecedented cave descent in the Dinaric Alps. His uncle is dead. The porters are dead. The report is meticulous, scientifically impeccable, and fundamentally untrue.
Farms and Drinkers
A Rhodesian tobacco farmer recounts a six-week bush trip in 1977 with the eloquence of a man who has told the story many times — but the polish of his telling conceals the truth of what happened when his friend died in a Fire Force contact gone wrong.
Soft When Wet
A South African geologist leads a 1962 survey into East Africa's interior, where his impeccable preparation and flawless instruments cannot measure what the territory is actually doing.
Cut Loose
A safari guide abandons his injured colleague in a rising flood in Namibia's Caprivi Strip. His five-day walk to safety proves he had the skills to have tried harder.
Stripped Country
A bush pilot hired for a geological survey along Kenya's Rift Valley makes a series of forced landings at abandoned colonial stations, each one cracking open a history her aerial view has kept sealed.
Fathom and Ruin
A whaling captain's hunt for a legendary bull sperm whale unfolds backward — from solitary wreckage to fractured crew to early confidence to departure — revealing how the same quality that made him admirable made him lethal.
Standing Into Danger
A methodical frigate captain engages a French corvette off Ushant with ninety percent of the intelligence he needs. The missing ten percent costs him men he cannot replace and an answer he will never receive.
Cochineal and Salt Water
A young ship's surgeon aboard a French privateer discovers that her captain — the most competent sailor she has ever known — has been selling captured cargo and munitions to both sides of the war, and must decide what to do with knowledge that corrodes everything it touches.
Carrying the Fire Downriver
A woman paddles her dead father's river alone. Grief keeps pulling her out of the present, and the river keeps punishing the absence.
Reaching for the Same Thing
Three strangers plan to steal a decommissioned diamond drilling array from an Aegean oil platform. Each tells their version. The accounts diverge. So do the people.
Ringing Salt
A geologist follows a dead explorer's journal into the hottest place on Earth, racing a mining company to reach a buried stone formation that rings like a bell — if the geology doesn't swallow them both first.
Walking Out with Nothing
Five walkers flee north across the Yukon barrens after a bush plane crash. The tundra strips them of gear, warmth, and each other. One woman keeps walking because she has learned the difference between wanting the wild and surviving it.
Reckoning by the Dead
A bush pilot flies antivenom across the Rift Valley to a dying settler she has met before and did not like. The weather turns. The engine falters. She navigates by dead reckoning over country that does not know her name, and arrives to find that competence obligates no one.
Substrate Zero
Marine geobiologist Noor Halabi leads a corporate-funded expedition to a deep-ocean vent system harboring life forms that predate Earth's crust. When sampling triggers a catastrophic biological cascade, discovery becomes survival — and the samples become the weight that might drown them all.
The Aria and the Gears
Six specialists converge on Geneva to steal a ledger from a man who ruined their mentor. The plan is clockwork. The getaway is not. What they take from the vault matters less than what the job takes from them.
Amateur Hour
Four mismatched thieves try to steal a forged Matisse from a New Haven storage unit. The heist fails. They try again. It fails differently. By the fourth attempt, what they're stealing and who they are have both become open questions.
The Honour of the Straits
In 1805, a naval surgeon and his captain share a friendship forged in close quarters and shared danger — until a night action in the Straits of Messina reveals something neither man can unknow about the other.